In his recent book, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism,
Bernard Reginster tackles the ambitious, and highly controversial,
project of articulating a systematic interpretation of Nietzsche's
philosophical project that coherently accounts for all of his
distinctive themes as well as provides a framework for interpreting his
more idiomatic views. In light of Nietzsche's own disdain towards the "will to a system," Reginster's approach depends upon his claim that
Nietzsche's statement against systematizers in The Twilight of the Idols
was the rejection of the aspiration to make philosophical knowledge an
all inclusive system based on a small set of foundational, self-evident
propositions and not the rejection of systematic thought per se.
Adhering to this interpretation, he endeavors to demonstrate that
Nietzsche's philosophy can be organized as a systematic response to the
crisis of nihilism.

Reginster tries to diffuse some of the controversy regarding his use of Nietzsche's Nachlass
(his unpublished notebooks) through an initial defense of what he calls
a qualified version of the priority principle; that is, he will not
accept views found in the notes as Nietzsche's considered thought
unless they cohere with views explicitly expressed in the published
works. In short, Reginster contends that since Nietzsche indicated he
was at work on a significant project of revaluation of values, it is
reasonable to think that at least some of the ideas in the notes
reflect, not erroneous or rejected ideas, but rather the most
sophisticated stages of his thought. If this is the case, a cautious
reliance on the unpublished notes--which were written in a plain,
straightforward style--is profitable for understanding the more
esoteric published views.

As a result of the complex issues intrinsic to an analytical
reconstruction of a rhetorician like Nietzsche, the book is highly
technical. However, although Reginster's meticulous conceptual analysis
can at times become somewhat laborious to read, his classifications
often reveal keen insights and never fail to provoke further thought.

After an incisive introductory summa, Reginster delves into an
analysis of what Nietzsche considered the nature and sources of
nihilism to be. He observes that its ambiguous nature admits of two
possible definitions: disorientation and despair. According to his
account, nihilistic disorientation is the condition in which
values have become devalued because they lack objective standing and
therefore nothing really matters--life has lost its meaning.
Nihilistic despair, on the other hand, is the condition
wrought when our highest values cannot be realized in this world and
there is no other world in which they can. It is this second
description that Reginster presents as the crisis to which Nietzsche
reacts. The main sources of this nihilism are the alleged death of God
(the state in which belief in God and in another world has been
discredited) and the additional assumption that human life has meaning
only if these beliefs are the case. The reason for nihilistic despair,
then, is the common supposition that our highest values in this world
require the existence of God (or another world) in order to be
realized. And it is in response to this inhospitable standpoint--the
belief that our highest moral values cannot be attained under the conditions of human life in "this" world--that Nietzsche deems them life-negating values.

In chapter two, Reginster lays out Nietzsche's putative metaethical
revaluation of values, which is his strategy for overcoming the crisis
of despair. Since maintaining our life-negating values despite the
death of God has led to nihilism as despair, the solution is to revalue
our values. Thus, Nietzsche concludes that there are no objective
values. Of course, the problematic consequence of this radical
revaluation is disorientation. Nevertheless, Reginster sees this as a
necessary, although volatile, first stage in Nietzsche's plan because
it establishes what could count as justification for his ethical claim
that the will to power is good. Regarding this metaethical revaluation, Reginster accommodates two plausible interpretations. First, on a subjectivist
reading of Nietzsche's works, justification amounts to simply showing
that the value called the will to power is a desire; since, normative
values are desires with a higher ranking or greater influence among the
rest of our desires. Second, according to a fictionalist
interpretation, justification amounts to either applying existing
positive evaluative predicates to the will to power in an ongoing game
of normative make-believe or appealing to supposed new conditions of
life to explain why the "new" evaluative principle better suits the
situation than the old values (this is more of a seduction with
normative appeal than a justification). Through this justification of
the will to power as normative, Nietzsche is said to have averted
nihilism as disorientation. In other words, he obtained the normative
evaluative principle according to which he could conduct a substantive
revaluation of morality, thereby overcoming nihilism as despair in a
manner that would not lead back to nihilism as disorientation.

In chapters three, four, and five, Reginster provides a detailed
analysis of the doctrine of the will to power, the concomitant
revaluation of suffering, and the doctrine of the eternal recurrence.
First, Reginster examines the connection between Nietzsche's will to
power and Arthur Schopenhauer's two-tiered structure of human willing
to substantiate his definition of the will to power as a second-order
desire for the overcoming of resistance in the quest for a definite
first-order desire. In short, Schopenhauer thought that all desires
were need-based and that they could be categorized either as a first-order desire for a determinate object (i.e., food, wealth, etc.) or as a second-order
desire whose object is a desire (i.e., the desire to have or pursue
desires). On this account, it follows that three conditions must be
fulfilled for the will to power to be satisfied: there is a first-order
desire for a definite end, there is resistance to its satisfaction, and
there is actual success in overcoming the resistance. Consequently, the
will to power is inherently paradoxical; that is, as soon as the
conditions for the satisfaction of the will to power are met it is
again dissatisfied. Therefore, it is a self-perpetuating desire. Next,
Reginster considers how Nietzsche revalues the meaning of suffering in
human life by positing it as an ingredient of the will to power. Since
the will to power is good, human suffering (Leiden)--construed as resistance--should not be viewed as something evil to be
eliminated. Last, he assesses various interpretations of the difficult
doctrine of the eternal recurrence and argues for a practical
interpretation that understands it as an imperative to embrace the
value of becoming and impermanence.

In his sixth and final chapter, Reginster contrasts suffering and
the affirmation of life with weakness and the negation of life. In so
doing, he considers Dionysus and tragic wisdom as the paradigmatic
example of the creative life, the overman as representing the ideal pursuit of new challenges and the commitment to overcoming, ressentiment
(repressed vengefulness) as the grounds for a genealogical critique of
the life-negating values of compassion and
happiness-as-permanent-satisfaction, the ascetic ideal as the prime
example of the negation of life, philanthropy as an endorsement of
euthanasia, and ethical elitism about the good life.

In this provocative book, Reginster argues for numerous
controversial interpretations of Nietzsche's distinctive themes in an
attempt to construct a systematic structure for the fruitful exegesis
of his more opaque ideas. All this certainly seems provisional;
however, given Reginster's rigorous analytical skills and the common
desire to comprehend Nietzsche, I suspect that his thesis is not going
away anytime soon. Moreover, since clarification is not necessarily
rehabilitation, Nietzsche still remains an incendiary figure.